Electronic collaboration and conferencing tools allow individuals in many locations to share desktop display and content. These collaboration and conferencing tools enable users to present and share slides, applications, files or the user's desktop to a large (or small) group of people in real-time using a web browser or networked application. Using networked conferencing as a meeting alternative or to enrich face-to-face meetings is quickly becoming a part of business communications.
Such virtual collaboration tools can reduce the amount of time people spend traveling to and from meetings. Although meetings are an essential part of business, meetings can take up the majority of time in the average business person's day. When meetings are more productive, this can enhance the business value of the meetings.
Scheduled or ad-hoc electronic meetings can reduce costs and increase productivity. Electronic sharing tools encourage collaboration, expedite decision-making and enhance interactions with customers, partners, and colleagues. In addition, software under development or products can be demonstrated to anyone quickly without significant expense. For example, virtual collaboration can allow users to show electronic slideshows, demonstrate product features, show videos, and review documentation.
Virtual collaboration environments enable users to provide a number of valuable functions due to the nature of electronic sharing. For example, users can jointly view, annotate, or edit word processing documents in real time. Users can collaborate on presentation material and communicate without the expense of traveling. In addition, users of conferencing systems can deliver high quality, time-critical training without generally worrying about hardware or software issues.
When electronic desktop and application sharing meetings take place, the users may desire to use an electronic whiteboard in the presentation. This allows all the meeting participants to draw or make notes using the whiteboard. In addition, images that are displayed on the whiteboard can be annotated upon.
Another function of collaboration and conferencing tools is the ability to share and transmit a live shared application to participants of a conference. For example, software developers may demonstrate a beta version of their product for customers to allow them to see the current version and provide feedback to the development team. Collaboration tools allow meeting participants to see the live shared application actually running on the presenter's desktop while the presenter is using, demonstrating, and discussing the shared application.
Unfortunately, switching between shared live applications and whiteboard annotation during virtual collaboration meetings or electronic learning sessions is rather difficult. Not only can it be difficult to switch between live content and whiteboard content but the complexity of switching back and forth can interrupt the flow of the presentation or interaction. With many types of collaboration tools, this type of switching is not even possible and it is overly difficult in others.
One difficulty in moving back and forth between a live shared application and a whiteboard is that collaboration tools allow users to run application sharing or use the snapshot tool but these two tools cannot generally be run simultaneously. Particularly, a user of a collaboration tool will have to stop live application sharing in order to use other functions in a collaboration tool. This also means that the participants receiving the shared application will not see the shared application from the presenter during a time period where another collaboration function is being used. For example, the live application sharing pane may turn black when another function is used.
Stopping the application sharing tool allows the presenter to switch to a snapshot tool and take a snapshot of the live application while the application is not being shared. The snapshot may then be opened in a whiteboard tool and the participants of the presentation can make whiteboard annotations. Finally, when the presenter wants to demonstrate the live application again, then the live application sharing is restarted by the presenter. All of these steps may take several minutes and severely interrupt the flow of the presentation.
If a presenter wants to reduce the time it takes to load an application snapshot into a whiteboard, then the presenter may save images to a storage location or hard drive in advance. Then the users can load the saved images into the whiteboard for annotation. This method usually means that the users prepare information before a conference and then drag and drop or open the graphics files into the whiteboard during a meeting. This process can be relatively burdensome and the pre-created snapshots may not exactly match up with what ends up being presented in the live demonstration. Moreover, the application sharing functions still have to be shut down to use the whiteboard functions using this approach.